Sunday, 18 February 2018

Only the other day I said that tobacco control had jumped the shark, but they just heroically leaped an even bigger one. Try not to laugh too much - because I think they are actually serious about this?

Many will remember us having fun with my page at the Tobacco Tactics website a few years ago. I was and am immensely proud to have been included (a screenshot of it is my Twitter banner) because if a bunch of routinely mendacious gutter-dwellers scratching around for pathetic smears see fit to fling a few at me, I must be doing something right.

However, for others this vile enterprise could cause real damage. I remember at the time of its launch that one individual mentioned had dog shit pushed through their letter box, and others who are undeservedly included could face consequences which would both harm the cause of public health and damage careers for no reason whatsoever.

There has been a lot of activity on the site recently, and just last week - incredibly - they added a page on the Global Forum on Nicotine. If you ever needed proof that the tobacco control cartel has absolutely no care about the public's health, this is game, set and match. I rest my case M'lud.

GFN has always irritated tobacco control because it commits a number of health nazi no-nos. 1) It dares to invite interested consumers to the event and {gasp} allows them to ask questions! Sometimes even speak on a panel! 2) It is open and transparent, providing its content free online for anyone to view and, crucially, 3) It involves all sides of the debate and refuses to buckle to tobacco control fascists who - as they do in every conference they ever organise themselves - demand that inconvenient voices be silenced.

Tobacco control conferences are designed solely to keep the prohibitionist bandwagon going, be a platform for the TC echo chamber to reinforce their lying agenda, and are never really interested in health. GFN actually is interested in health ... so of course Tobacco Tactics has attacked it.

It is curious because one of the 'crimes' GFN has committed is to set up a scholarship programme, described by TT thus:

The sponsorship programme, which in 2018 awarded 15 scholarships to projects up to the value of US$7,500 each, aimed to:

- build research capacity in the field of tobacco harm reduction;- develop the evidence base;- raise awareness of research and its implications for public health policy;- enable consumers to make more informed personal health choices; and- improve the implementation and understanding of tobacco harm reduction

Sounds good doesn't it? Well not for the tobacco control industry, no. Because, you see, they don't really care about decent research being carried out because their focus is on salaries and keeping their truth-free cult vaccinated against heresy. To illustrate the level of totalitarian control this site promotes, the term "tobacco harm reduction" links to a page where it is implied that THR is a concept created by the tobacco industry. It's like HIV prevention, methadone, safe needle exchanges and car safety zones have never existed. The fact that the two main drivers behind the conference are a highly-respected Professor of Public Health recognised for a lifetime of dedication towards reducing harm from drug abuse, and a former Prison Service administrator, who has organised conferences all over the world on drug harm reduction and city health programmes for decades, is irrelevant to the vile maggots behind Tobacco Tactics. Why seek out what will work for reducing smoking when you can just indiscriminately smear people to protect jobs in tobacco control, eh?

This funding - obviously, according to tobacco controllers - means that anyone taking that money is being directed and controlled by 'Big Tobacco'. Yet, for some reason, it's completely different for the Tobacco Tactics site:

The making of TobaccoTactics was funded by by Cancer Research UK Limited and Smokefree South West. These funders have had no input into the research or its conclusions. They are not responsible for any content on or the publication of the wiki, and they do not necessarily endorse any of it.

I'm sorry, but they can't have it both ways. Either you can fund an initiative and it can be entirely impartial, or you can't. Therefore, if PMI are being assumed to be pulling the strings behind FSFW - and therefore, by extension, GFN - then so must we assume CRUK are doing the same for Tobacco Tactics, yes? There is one less step of separation between CRUK and TT, so tobacco control's logic dictates that CRUK's influence must be far more acute than PMI's over GFN, surely?

Hey, they're not my rules, they are entirely those of Tobacco Tactics. Anything else would be weapons grade hypocrisy from tobacco control.

Which is all quite funny considering a site funded by CRUK is attacking a conference which regularly invites people in receipt of CRUK funding to speak, sometimes even people they describe as CRUK representatives. If GFN is now a tobacco industry front group, as Tobacco Tactics implies, then surely we should soon expect pages designed to highlight their treachery. In fact, since CRUK allow these people to attend, they are obviously in cahoots with GFN so CRUK should have their own page too.

Absurd? Yes, of course, but it's just another day through the looking glass with the morally bankrupt 'public health' Goliath.

Other desperate allegations against GFN are that they "breach FCTC rules", citing Article 5.3. This is a guideline which applies to governments "in accordance with national law". How GFN - a conference organised by a private company (hint to tobacco control: private companies are not governments) - has "breached" something that doesn't apply to it is anyone's guess, but I venture to suggest that it's just Tobacco Tactics fully intending a lie to be accepted as truth, a common tobacco control tactic.

Lastly, the laughable site accuses GFN of the 'crime' of inviting panellists with tobacco company links. They specifically list nine of them. Now, considering in the 5 years that GFN has been going they have invited approximately 150 speakers, any sane individual would conclude that the vast majority of panellists are public health researchers and academics. It's not really looking like much of a tobacco industry front group to me, especially since Simon Clark has criticised it numerous times. As conspiracy theories go, David Icke is looking pretty unremarkable when compared to the woo being peddled by Tobacco Tactics. But hey, that CRUK funding has to be earned, and the only way to do that is to keep simpering back to their masters with new and ever more bizarre 'targets' like a panting Labrador fetching a stick in the park and hurtling back for its reward of a petting session.

Like children who think there are monsters in the wardrobe, anyone who has even interacted with a tobacco company employee is game for this ridiculous website (in one laughable entry, someone who admitted they were bought drinks by a company "and reciprocated" was deserving of a TT page ... yes, just buying rounds in a pub is now on their radar. It really is that pathetic). But now it seems Tobacco Tactics is trying to undermine a conference which is trying to facilitate ways of reducing smoking, and is indirectly incriminating its own side, including representatives of its funders along with academics and NGOs in doing so. I suppose if it means Deborah Arnott - a speaker at every GFN so far - refuses to turn up on principle (because surely she now should or she would deserve her own page too) it will be a win, but what a daft state of affairs.

Around 400 people will be at the GFN event in Warsaw in June, along with over 50 journalists. According to Tobacco Tactics, we can now assume that they are all supporting a tobacco industry front group.

However, the very worst part of this whole farce is why state-funded Bath University (and previously the fortunately now dead Smokefree South West) is wasting taxpayers' money to fund something that is targeting forces for good like GFN? And why is CRUK spending cash donated to research cancer - their ads say that's where it goes, I saw one today - to fund bottom-feeding maggots like those who write absurd entries like the GFN one in Tobacco Tactics?

Ooh, I see Tobacco Tactics has a right to reply page, complete with an email address. I wonder whether they reply to it if contacted?